Abstract

The purpose of the Youth Guarantee programme is not to guarantee a job (this being an issue often wrongly emphasised by the press), but rather to represent an exceptional "testing tool" to assess the capability of local institutions to improve employment opportunities for unemployed young people. After describing how the Youth Guarantee works, the analysis will mainly focus on the problems that emerged during the first one-year trial period. The text is a must-read for anyone involved in active labour market policies and public employment services, since the problems encountered in the implementation of this programme are "structural" in nature, namely they will remain so even after this trial period. The conclusions provide some proposals concerning the tools public organisations should "bet" on in order to actually improve employment opportunities for youths.